Tracy Corrigan is a columnist and assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph, who writes mainly on business and finance. She was previously with the Financial Times, most recently as head of the Lex Column.

City may be cross about supertax, but politicians are as one

What next for UK banking? Another speech from a Barclays executive is one answer to that question, which was posed in a New Statesman panel discussion in Westminster this morning.

Last week, the bank’s newly promoted president, Bob Diamond, seemed to be traipsing valiantly from one platform to another. Now, he has apparently handed the baton to chief executive John Varley, who kicked off this morning’s discussion with his thoughts on the importance of social responsibility in banking. I’m sure this subject is uppermost in the minds of his staff over in Canary Wharf– in the seconds they can spare from working out the potential impact on their bonuses of the supertax announced in last week’s pre-Budget report.

On that subject, Lord Myners, City minister, and Mark Hoban, the shadow financial secretary to the Treasury, seemed similarly unmoved by all the flapping in the City. The Tories, Mr Hoban explained, are open to the idea of a windfall tax, though worried about “tax policy made on the hoof in the UK”. And Colin Breed, Liberal Democrat MP and Treasury Select Committee member, agreed that after the taxpayer-funded bailout "it doesn't seem terribly unreasonable to have some of it back."

Meanwhile, the City still awaits clarification from HMRC on which bits of the financial sector – just bankers, or fund managers and brokers too – are to be targeted. I can understand their distress. But instead of just blaming the politicians, they might like to reserve some of their ire for their bosses, who have walked straight into this with their eyes tight shut. Had banks made reasonable efforts to show restraint in the wake of the financial crisis, I doubt we would be here. Barclays' and Goldman Sachs' latest gestures to tighten their policies are probably too little and certainly too late.

The government, meanwhile, should have pushed for a global supertax, if that was what it wanted, through the Group of 20, instead of agreeing on wimpish guidelines which are in line with so-called "existing best practice" – best being a relative term.